Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and other electronic equipment. Semiconductor devices are typically fabricated by sequentially depositing insulating or dielectric layers, conductive layers, and semiconductor layers of materials over a semiconductor substrate, and patterning the various material layers using lithography to form circuit components and elements thereon.
The semiconductor industry continues to improve the integration density of various electronic components (e.g., transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, etc.) by continual reductions in minimum feature size, which allows more components to be integrated into a given area. These smaller electronic components also require smaller packages that utilize less area than the packages of the past, in some applications.
During the manufacturing of the semiconductor devices, various processing steps are used to fabricate integrated circuits on a semiconductor wafer. Generally, the processes include coating a photoresist on the semiconductor wafer. After a photoresist material is coated, exposed and developed on the semiconductor wafer surface, an edge bead rinse (EBR) process is frequently performed before the semiconductor wafer can be processed further.
Although existing methods and devices for operating the processing steps have generally been adequate for their intended purposes, they have not been entirely satisfactory in all respects. Consequently, it would be desirable to provide a solution for the process control for semiconductor manufacturing operations.